Welcome to our calendar feature BIG WEEK, wherein our expert Arts & Culture writers recommend the best things do. This next month, we are going to see some punk shows at Thee Parkside, which just announced it is closing at the end of March. Boo, but out with a bang!
GENERAL ARTS
Marke B. is in the arts hot seat.
FRI/30-SUN/1: PIVOT FESTIVAL The 11th annual installment of this incredible boundary-pushing music festival has enlisted Andy Meyerson of the excellent Living Earth Show duo to curate—and boy is he bringing it. (If you haven’t grokked Living Earth’s terrific Roar Shack venue, hop to it, btw.) The weekend fills Herbst Theater with hyper-San Franciscan sounds, with performances by vocalist Tanner Porter, San Francisco Ballet dancer- choreographer Myles Thatcher, and Bay Area ensembles Bucket List (featuring composer-creator Mark Applebaum), and KoollooK (with dancer-choreographer Babatunji and composer-creator Dennis Aman). Work by John Cage and Mercy Cunningham will be presented. I’m especially looking forward to the band Trust Me, featuring punk legend Lynnee Breedlove, who delve into the tragic story of Breedlove’s father and stepmother’s brutal murder at the hands of her stepbrother—finding catharsis in the music. Herbst Theater, SF. More info here.
FRI/30 + SAT/31: 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDWARDIAN BALL A celebration of dark whimsy and baroque frivolity that has graced SF for a quarter of a century, this steampunk-meets-circus is the mannered cousin of Burning Man, with plenty of debauchery and mystery to match. Inspired “by the late, great author and illustrator Edward Gorey and set in a re-imagined ‘Edwardian Era,’ this multi-media extravaganza has grown over the past 25 years from an underground club party into an internationally recognized festival of the arts, now operating with the blessing of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust.” Throw on something striking. Regency Ballroom, SF. More info here.
FRI/30-MARCH 29: TABI TABI PO: COME OUT WITH THE SPIRITS! YOU ARE WELCOME HERE “Through Indigenous oral traditions and narratives, both autobiographical and imagined, Cece Carpio’s first solo exhibition, Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here, highlights the power and necessity of storytelling. As a cultural, political, and relational practice shared across cultures, storytelling brings attention to the sacred and often overlooked spaces essential to understanding how all things come to be.” SOMArts, SF. More info here.
SAT/31: FRIENDS OF PERFECTION “A collective fever dream calls from beyond the doom loop. Small Press Traffic presents Friends of Perfection, a poets theater experiment inspired by the communes of 1970s San Francisco and collaboratively written and performed by Styles Alexander, Mike Chin, Gabriele Christian, Maxe Crandall, Kota Ezawa, Xandra Ibarra, Sloka Krishnan, Kevin Lo, montes marin, Cornelius O, Sam Sax, Maria Silk, and featuring animations by Craig Calderwood and puppetry by Mike Chin.” 7pm-9pm, The Lab, SF. More info here.
MUSIC
Hit up John-Paul Shiver’s Under the Stars column for great tunes and shows every week.
THURS/29: GIRL TONES is about to run clean away with all the early-year festival accolades. Their high-energy rock duo, alchemy, generated by two sisters named Kenzie and Laila, is about to take in and then redistribute all the smoke. Showcasing their classically trained pedigree, that moxie riotousness, think all-female White Stripes, these wonder-powers activate a whole new thing. And they knew it, too. So much so that Kenzie transitioned from cello to guitar and Laila from piano to drums. Saying eff it to the dusty, it was time to electrify sentient beings from this galaxy to the next. But don’t overthink it or look too hard: They’re on everybody’s Artists to Watch list for 2026. As Nas once said, “It ain’t hard to tell.” With Dexter and the Moonstones, 8pm, Cornerstone, Berkeley. More info here.
FRI/30: ESG + BUSH TETRAS You’d envision this lineup playing landmark New York City venues: Mudd Club, Irving Plaza, Danceteria, Bond’s Casino, Hurrah! The quintessential No Wave meets freak beat incubators where Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and John Lurie all could be in attendance. Swimming in the chaos. But here and now, add in West Coast no wave, avant-punksters Naked Roommate as openers, with their Oakland-Berkeley weirdness. Ya know, those thrift store jammers powered by electronic gizmo quirkiness and bizarre horn lines. Joining them on the Bay Area support, SF’s own Mild Universe will be touching down, crafting their self-titled “dreamy dance music” that shuffles and flows between lite funk and instrument driven house music. Such a yestermorrow bill, with floor stomping verve. 7pm, Great American Music Hall, SF. More info here.
FOOD & DRINK
Tamara Palmer’s weekly Good Taste column tells you where to stick your fork. Sign up for the new Good Taste newsletter here.
ALL WEEK LONG: COOKIES FOR COMMUNITY Even (and maybe especially) the bakers are disgusted with the moment. This week, Devil’s Teeth is saying it with two kinds of anti-ICE iced cookies, with proceeds going to Community Action Network Minnesota. Might as well get a breakfast sandwich and add some of their signature shark cookies in your box, while you’re there. 3876 Noriega Street; 3619 Balboa Street; 1 Embarcadero, SF. More info here.
A HARVEY MILK SANDWICH I suspect there is more than one Harvey Milk sandwich in San Francisco, but I just tried and can recommend the one at Corona Heights Market and Deli. It’s got a base of Ovengold turkey and jalapeño Jack cheese, to which you can add your preferred toppings. Served on your choice of bread/roll, I selected the polarizing Dutch Crunch, as is my tendency to do. 4400 17th Street, SF.
FILM
Dennis Harvey’s long-running Screen Grabs has tons more flicks to recommend.
THU/29-FEBRUARY 25: 9 @ NIGHT Rob Nilsson has lived nearly his entire filmmaking life here, starting with involvement in the activist 1970s collective Cine Manifest, on through independent features that got limited commercial release. Then he accelerated: Over a 14-year course in collaboration with the Tenderloin yGroup he developed, shot, and completed the 9 @ Night series of primarily B&W, digitally-shot features. They encompassed participants from that acting workshop for homeless residents as well as professional actors, creating improv-based dramatic narratives with diverse themes and styles, the separate entries occasionally linked by overlapping characters or incidents. A very rare chance to catch the whole cycle will be provided by the Tenderloin Museum on Tuesday and Thursday nights starting this week. Tenderloin Museum, SF. More info here.
OPENING FRI/30: A PRIVATE LIFE Dr. Lillian Steiner (Jodie Foster) is a Parisian psychotherapist who holds sessions in an office within her historied residential-building apartment. You rather marvel that she actually has clients, given how officious and curt she is—doesn’t this job require a degree of demonstrable empathy? We soon realize she is also a grouch towards her amiable ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), and a very hands-off parent to her adult son (Vincent Lacoste), whose newborn child she seems almost allergic to embracing in trad grandmotherly fashion. Then a patient unexpectedly commits suicide, and in attending her wake, then funeral, Lillian gets such a hostile reaction from the woman’s spouse (Mathieu Amaric) that she begins to fear the death was actually a homicide. It’s a ‘cozy’ mystery, and Foster plays a great, fluently French grump.
NIGHTLIFE
Marke B. usually knows what’s up.
SAT/31: MISS KITTIN DJ SET She set the world on fire during the electroclash craze with The Hacker (singles “1982” and “Frank Sinatra” will never die), and she’s driven deeper into her darker pleasures ever since, mixing grimy rock sounds into latex-tight techno—with a dose of French glamor and devil-may-care glee. Don’t miss local fave The Baptist opening. 9:30pm, Great Northern, SF. More info here.
SAT/31: DEATH GUILD CATURDAY SF’s longest-running weekly party is a goth jam on Monday at DNA Lounge, but every so often its dark-clad geniuses hop on their brooms and head over to Cat Club for a Saturday soiree. Join Decay, Melting Girl, Joe Radio, Sage, Bit for everything from classic industrial to up-to-the-minute dark wave. 9pm-2am, Cat Club, SF. More info here.
SAT/31: EMO NITE DJ Frank Zummo (of Sum 41!) headlines this popular party for proudly unpopular types—who, it turns out, are now kind of the most popular of all. We don’t pretend to understand the whims of human history and pop culture, but we still listen to a lot of SDRE. 9pm-2am, Rickshaw Stop, SF. More info here.
